Melis: Harbin, Culture, Virtuality and Foucault

I'm interested in Harbin Hot Springs ethnographically for a wide variety of reasons.

Metaphorically, how does Harbin Hot Springs produce the "honey" {which may include the relaxation response and qualities of free sociality and creativity there} that it does, - in other words, how does this milieu {assemblage, apparatus?} give rise to the Harbin experience, which is varied and individual - a certain kind of neurophysiology - as part of a concept of mind, or subjectivity?

There are 'interesting minds' there that 'process code' remarkably and multi-facetedly, in countercultural, hippie and New Age ways, as well. How does this work?

Also, how do the serendipity and synchronicity I see and experience at Harbin work? I don't know the academic literature on the anthropology or philosophy of serendipity and synchronicity - aspects of humanness - nor of the 'present?' Thoughts? In what way might Michel Foucault address some of these questions? Also, how would Foucault approach questions of the experience of the 'present' - the now - in terms of history? Perhaps it's the opposite of stultitia and is, instead, an example of what remarkable practices, and 'decisive moments' of 'care of the self' give rise to. How might I examine all of this in Foucauldian terms? In general, these are all questions about how unique 'cultural phenomena,' subjectively experienced, work. Culture can be both very ephemeral, yet very real, through communication and language.

I'm also interested in documenting Harbin - it's a remarkable, unique, social constellation {an instantiation of 'care of the self'?}, both as ethnography and as virtual world, and both in the present, and since 1972, through observation, talking and writing. In doing so, I'd like to explore how one might generalize to ways of being, thinking processes as well as experiences {flow: the psychology of optimal experience' experiences, in the aggregate}, and then generate these in new form, ~ virtually.

In the context of a virtual world, which we might all edit and develop, people, in their creativity, might create new {Harbin-related} experiences (Harbin is experimental, and, as an assemblage, instantiates creative possibility; it's 'real,' and remarkable, when I think about it}. So, in documenting {archiving} it - what a folklorist might do - I'd like to understand it, to open the possibility to instantiate it in new ways, through a kind of generalization process, expressed virtually, that one might experience (might affect subjectivity, in Foucauldian terms).

These are current questions I'm interested in.

Ladybug: Elicit The Relaxation Response

"The ideal is to develop a routine, a time to bring forth the relaxation response that becomes as much a part of the day as brushing your teeth."


ELICIT THE RELAXATION RESPONSE

Elicitation of the relaxation response is actually quite easy. There are two essential steps:

1. Repetition of a word, sound, phrase, prayer, or muscular activity.
2. Passive disregard of everyday thoughts that inevitably come to mind and the return to your repetition.

The following is the generic technique taught at the Benson-Henry Institute:

1. Pick a focus word, short phrase, or prayer that is firmly rooted in your belief system, such as "one," "peace," "The Lord is my shepherd," "Hail Mary full of grace," or "shalom."
2. Sit quietly in a comfortable position.
3. Close your eyes.
4. Relax your muscles, progressing from your feet to your calves, thighs, abdomen, shoulders, head, and neck.
5. Breathe slowly and naturally, and as you do, say your focus word, sound, phrase, or prayer silently to yourself as you exhale.
6. Assume a passive attitude. Don't worry about how well you're doing. When other thoughts come to mind, simply say to yourself, "Oh well," and gently return to your repetition.
7. Continue for ten to 20 minutes.
8. Do not stand immediately. Continue sitting quietly for a minute or so, allowing other thoughts to return. Then open your eyes and sit for another minute before rising.
9. Practice the technique once or twice daily. Good times to do so are before breakfast and before dinner.

Regular elicitation of the relaxation response has been scientifically proven to be an effective treatment for a wide range of stress-related disorders. In fact, to the extent that any disease is caused or made worse by stress, the relaxation response can help.

Other techniques for evoking the relaxation response are:

Imagery
Progressive muscle relaxation
Repetitive prayer
Mindfulness meditation
Repetitive physical exercises
Breath focus



http://www.mbmi.org/basics/whatis_rresponse_elicitation.asp


~ Heading in to elicit the Relaxation Response now . . . :)

Love,
Scott

Hive: Harbin, Honey, Warm Water and Culture

Harbin is a honeycomb beehive.

If archiving Harbin is partly about understanding how communication works in an arc hive of counterculture, how will I engage this in a virtual world?

A virtual world made with Open Sim Virtual World software (which can be developed independently of having a connection to the Internet; Harbin doesn't have wi-fi for guests) / Second Life - is a kind of archive.

Harbin is an arc(h)-hive ~ making honey. Such metaphors and characterization of communication and language open ways to understand Harbin as an unique social constellation~assemblage.


How is Harbin an archive for a kind of 'living wisdom' of the 1960s and 1970s, that is "Living the Future" {a 1996 pamphlet that Harbin residents wrote and published}? The present and potential for intimacy are central to this experience. Some Harbin residents have thought of Harbin as an ark, too. Harbin has been experimental in a wide variety of ways.


I think part of the honey that's produced has to do with the relaxation response in the pools - a kind of oneness - and in the pool area, as well as the nudity that many people find beneficial. As I see it, this and Harbin emerge from the 1960s and 1970s. And when a kind of Harbin 'Omega-brain' {vis-a-vis the harmonizing effects of omega-3 fatty acids, e.g. 1000 mg flax seed oil, 3-4 times a day ~ a term I coined just now} - the Harbin experience {as I understand it} is generated - life is sweet.

Arc: Steps to Elicit the Relaxation Response

Steps to Elicit the Relaxation Response


1.
Sit quietly in a comfortable position.

2.
Close your eyes.

3.
Deeply relax all your muscles,
beginning at your feet and progressing up to your face.
Keep them relaxed.

4.
Breathe through your nose.
Become aware of your breathing.
As you breathe out, say the word, "one"*,
silently to yourself. For example,
breathe in ... out, "one",- in .. out, "one", etc.
Breathe easily and naturally.

5.
Continue for 10 to 20 minutes.
You may open your eyes to check the time, but do not use an alarm.
When you finish, sit quietly for several minutes,
at first with your eyes closed and later with your eyes opened.
Do not stand up for a few minutes.

6.
Do not worry about whether you are successful
in achieving a deep level of relaxation.
Maintain a passive attitude and permit relaxation to occur at its own pace.
When distracting thoughts occur,
try to ignore them by not dwelling upon them
and return to repeating "one."
With practice, the response should come with little effort.
Practice the technique once or twice daily,
but not within two hours after any meal,
since the digestive processes seem to interfere with
the elicitation of the Relaxation Response.



* or any soothing, mellifluous sound, preferably with no meaning.
or association, to avoid stimulation of unnecessary thoughts.


Herbert Benson, M.D. Harvard Medical School




This stopped being accessible here - http://relaxationresponse.org/steps/ - in mid Summer 2008, but is available here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20050215214204/relaxationresponse.org/steps/

and also on the Massachusetts General Hospital's web site here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20090303164351/http://www.mbmi.org/basics/whatis_rresponse_elicitation.asp

Previous image - 
https://web.archive.org/web/20170120142157/http://www.bioteams.com/images/team_breakthrou.jpg


Enjoy!

...

Oak: Brilliant Orange Light

Oak: Brilliant Orange Light


Daybreak sleeping by the road
Brilliant orange light releases up
Beautiful California oak

*

...

(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2008/09/oak-brilliant-orange-light-releases-oak.html - September 27, 2008)

natural, beautiful warm pools, omega-3s, the relaxation response, music & dancing

natural, beautiful warm pools, omega-3s, the relaxation response, music & dancing :)


into the pools . . .

Harmony: Choral Music, Care of the Self and Harbin

The tenors this late afternoon stood in front of the rest of the chorus singing Brahms' "Gypsy Songs" {Zigeunerlieder}. Tears welled up in me as I heard, for the first time, different sections sing together so exquisitely and finely. As a tenor for the first time {I have sung base-baritone in the past}, I have stood only in the back, and been moved by different sections singing together, but not like standing in front. What voices and singing can do!

I'd like to bring these singing processes together with eliciting loving bliss to create a new form. As I envision this new form, it's a kind of chamber music, choral music, contact improvisation & {HAI} exploration, but I haven't yet seen how this might actual work.


!!!


Here's my reply to Colin:

Colin:


Thanks for your insightful comments on this blog for the September 3, 2008 entry: "Thistle: Foucault's Care of the Self and Harbin Hot Springs." I think that askesis (as training, a development on Foucault's reading of it, already a salutary interpretation) and pedagogy {defined by a fairly well defined set of goals vis-a-vis enjoyment at Harbin} vis-a-vis Foucault is a potentially fruitful way to instantiate it. What language or thinking might best engage Foucault vis-a-vis this? From which of Foucault's texts did aymon's "What is practice?" and "What is a decisive moment" (17 September 2008 labinar with Paul) come from, or were extrapolated from?

Concerning the virtual, here's a brief response of one key, philosophical articulation with Foucault vis-a-vis Deleuze that I'd like to think through:
http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2008/09/bioluminescence-deleuze-and-virtuality.html

Vis-a-vis your reading of Foucault and my actual-virtual ethnographic Harbin project, is Socrates responding to an ethos / context in Athens where Socrates' "care of the self" orientations emerge in response to a specific tradition / context / ethos / assemblage (how would an ethnography of Socrates' world read?)? The actual Harbin may be a result of Ishvara's and, somehow, "Harbin vis-a-vis the 60 and 70s," thinking since 1972 as well as every other hippie that's come through Harbin's gate, somehow in the aggregate. How might Foucault "parse" this, (or I parse this vis-a-vis Foucault) as he was writing in the context of the intellectual liberations of the 60s and 70s, as well? How might I rigorously and interestingly tease out a Harbin ethos vis-a-vis the 60s and 70s, represented as actual and virtual Harbin, in relation to Foucault? I haven't thought of Harbin as a mid-wife heretofore.

Harbin's sociality is unique, emerging from the '60s and 70s, in a beautiful, remote valley, where personal freedom is a key part of the ethos, to a significant degree.

I do want to make the relaxation response in a bath tub at home, or anywhere, while visiting virtual Harbin actual (and even Mozartian, somehow), but it will only complement the touch, sociality and proximity aspects of actual Harbin. And travel itself, for me, elicits a kind of bliss, too, different from walking to one's (hypothetically) beautiful bath-room in one's home. And since Ishvara - the founder, who is still around - bought the Harbin property in 1972, Harbin's history has shaped its remarkable milieu, and as a geographically delimited field-site, its history is unique to Harbin as place - one can feel and know it as culture (in a historical sense) pretty directly, if one thinks about it, especially while on property. I think Harbin offers an unique assemblage of 'flow: the psychology of optimal experience' experiences (Csikszentmihalyi), in the aggregate, which I'd like to instantiate virtually, in terms of 'care of the self,' and perhaps vis-a-vis Deleuze.

I was impressed with Chris's writing, when I read "Two Bits'" introduction, and also that readers might edit the text in a variety of ways. To make virtual Harbin editable or not, is another question, vis-a-vis creating virtual Harbin as ethnography, and as a comparable and comparative field site. How to create, complement and add to the beauty that is already at Harbin as place and ethos, which I can see, metaphorically, as a kind of improvisational opera, occurring 'in' Harbin visitors and residents.

So, I'm wondering, vis-a-vis Foucault and Paul, how I might engage the many practices of Harbin - going to the pools {and related 'relaxation response'}, relaxing on the sun deck - with friends or alone, the potential for intimacy, the nakedness, the Watsu {water shiatsu} and waterdance, the unconditional dances, the coming into the moment - the 'present' - and letting things go, the 150-180 residents as key parts of this assemblage with their own unique 'wisdom' and as friends, the films in the theater, the milieu of nature and clean air, the food in the restaurant and market, the musical events, the hippie ('New Age') thinking in liberating and positive senses, the hippie, bohemian ethos, the cleanliness vis-a-vis the pools, the simplicity, the possibility to camp and live outside - as aspects of a specific Harbin assemblage of 'care of the self,' that I might read as askesis and pedagogy, {and/or 'practice' and 'decisive moments' a la aymon}.

*

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giraffe

...

Bioluminescence: Deleuze and Virtuality

Here are some Deleuzian perspectives on virtuality that I'll articulate with my creation of a virtual Harbin in Open Sim / Second Life as anthropological field site, and as ethnography, ~ partly to explore eliciting bliss as a form of 'care of the self' {Foucault}:



From the entry on "Gilles Deleuze" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

"In his magnum opus Difference and Repetition, he tries to develop a metaphysics adequate to contemporary mathematics and science—a metaphysics in which the concept of multiplicity replaces that of substance, event replaces essence and virtuality replaces possibility."



"In Bergsonism (1966), Deleuze develops the ideas of virtuality and multiplicity that will serve as the backbone of his later work. From Maimon's reading of Kant, we know that Deleuze needs to substitute the notion of the condition of the genesis of the real for the notion of conditions of possibility of representational knowledge. The positive name for that genetic condition is the virtual, which Deleuze adopts from the following Bergsonian argument. The notion of the possible, Bergson holds in Creative Evolution, is derived from a false problem that confuses the “more” with the “less” and ignores differences in kind; there is not less but more in the idea of the possible than in the real, just as there is more in the idea of nonbeing than in that of being, or more in the idea of disorder than in that of order. When we think of the possible as somehow “pre-existing” the real, we think of the real, then we add to it the negation of its existence, and then we project the “image” of the possible into the past. We then reverse the procedure and think of the real as something more than possible, that is, as the possible with existence added to it. We then say that the possible has been “realized” in the real. By contrast, Deleuze will reject the notion of the possible in favor of that of the virtual. Rather than awaiting realization, the virtual is fully real; what happens in genesis is that the virtual is actualized.

The fundamental characteristic of the virtual, that which means it must be actualized rather than realized, is its differential makeup. Deleuze always held the critical axiom that the ground cannot resemble that which it grounds; he constantly critiques the “tracing” operation by which identities in real experience are said to be conditioned by identities in the transcendental. For instance, Deleuze criticizes Kant for copying the transcendental field in the image of the empirical field. That is, empirical experience is personal, identitarian and centripetal; there is a central focus, the subject, in which all our experiences are tagged as belonging to us. Kant says this empirical identity is only possible if we can posit the Transcendental Unity of Apperception, that is, the possibility of adding “I think” to all our judgments. Instead of this smuggled-in or “traced” identity, Deleuze will want to have the transcendental field be differential. Deleuze still wants to work back from experience, but since the condition cannot resemble the conditioned, and since the empirical is personal and individuated, the transcendental must be impersonal and pre-individual. The virtual is the condition for real experience, but it has no identity; identities of the subject and the object are products of processes that resolve, integrate, or actualize (the three terms are synonymous for Deleuze) a differential field. The Deleuzean virtual is thus not the condition of possibility of any rational experience, but the condition of genesis of real experience.

As we have seen, the virtual, as genetic ground of the actual, cannot resemble that which it grounds; thus, if we are confronted with actual identities in experience, then the virtual ground of those identities must be purely differential. Deleuze adopts “multiplicity” from Bergson as the name for such a purely differential field. In this usage, Deleuze later clarifies, “multiplicity” designates the multiple as a substantive, rather than as a predicate. The multiple as predicate generates a set of philosophical problems under the rubric of “the one and the many” (a thing is one or multiple, one and multiple, and so on). With multiplicity, or the multiple as substantive, the question of the relation between the predicates one/multiple is replaced by the question of distinguishing types of multiplicities (as with Bergson's distinction of qualitative and quantitative multiplicities in Time and Free Will). A typological difference between substantive multiplicities, in short, is substituted for the dialectical opposition of the one and the multiple."



"Deleuze pushes Leibniz's thought to a point where Leibniz could never have taken it, given his theological presuppositions. This is the point where one begins to consider the virtual domain on its own account, freed from its actualization in a world and its individuals. On this score, Deleuze often likes to cite Jorge Luis Borges's famous story, “The Garden of the Forking Paths,” in which such a virtual world is described in the labyrinthine book of a Chinese philosopher named Ts'ui Pên: “In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives, he chooses one at the expense of others. In the almost unfathomable Ts'ui Pên, he chooses—simultaneously—all of them… In Ts'ui Pên's work, all the possible solutions occur, each one being the point of departure for other bifurcations.” Leibniz had in fact given a similar presentation of the world at the conclusion of the Theodicy. In Deleuze's transformation of the Leibnizian / Borgesian image, the three Kantian transcendent Ideas of God, World, and Self all take on a completely different demeanor. First, God is no longer a Being who compares and chooses the richest compossible world; he has now become a pure Process that affirms incompossibilities and passes through them. (As the notion of “process” here attests, Deleuze's relation to Whitehead is one of the most important contemporary issues for students of his thought; although the points of comparison are many, Deleuze himself rarely discussed Whitehead, save for several important pages in The Fold.) Second, the world is no longer a continuous world defined by its pre-established harmony; instead, divergences, bifurcations, and incompossibles must now be seen to belong to one and the same universe, a chaotic universe in which divergent series trace endlessly bifurcating paths, and give rise to violent discords and dissonances that are never resolved into a harmonic tonality: a “chaosmos,” as Deleuze puts it (borrowing a word from Joyce) and no longer a world. In contrast, Leibniz could only save the “harmony” of this world by relegating discordances and disharmonies to other possible worlds—this was his theological sleight of hand. Third, selves or individuals, rather than being closed upon the compossible and convergent world they express from within, are now torn open, and kept open through the divergent series and incompossible ensembles that continually pull them outside themselves. The “monadic” subject, as Deleuze puts it, becomes the “nomadic” subject. In other words, if Deleuze is Leibnizian, it is only by eliminating the idea of a God who chooses the best of all possible worlds, with its pre-established harmony and well-established selves; in Deleuze, incompossibilities and dissonances belong to one and the same world, the only world, our world. But they belong to our world as its virtual register; developing the thought of the virtual is one of the great challenges of Deleuze's masterpiece, Difference and Repetition, to which we now turn."



"In isolating the conditions of genesis, Deleuze sets up a tripartite ontological scheme, positing three interdependent registers: the virtual, intensive, and actual. Overlooking many important nuances, we can say that Deleuze's basic notion is that in all realms of being intensive morphogenetic processes follow differential virtual multiplicities to produce localized and individuated actual substances with extensive properties. Simply put, the actualization of the virtual proceeds by way of intensive processes. For orientation purposes, it's useful to consider Gilbert Simondon's theory of individuation as a very simple model for what Deleuze calls “actualization.” For Simondon, crystallization is a paradigm of individuation: a supersaturated solution is metastable; from that pre-individuated field, replete with gradients of density that are only implicit “forms” or “potential functions,” individual crystals precipitate out. The crucial difference is that crystals form in homogenous solutions, while the Deleuzean virtual is composed of “Ideas” or “multiplicities” involving differential relations among heterogeneous components, linked rates of change of, for instance, cell division and gene expression in embryogenesis as mediated by “positional information.”"



"To see how Ideas are transcendental and immanent, we have to appreciate that an Idea is a concrete universal, unlike Kantian concepts of the understanding. In an early article on Bergson (“The Conception of Difference in Bergson” [1956]), Deleuze gave a particularly helpful example of this distinction. In La Pensée et le Mouvant, Bergson had shown that there are two ways of determining what the spectrum of “colors” have in common. (1) You can extract from particular colors an abstract and general idea of color (“by removing from the red that which makes it red, from the blue what makes it blue, from the green what makes it green”). Or, (2) you can make all these colors “pass through a convergent lens, bringing them to a single point,” in which case a “pure white light” is obtained that “makes the differences between the shades stand out.” The former case defines a single generic “concept” with a plurality of objects; the relation between concept and object is one of subsumption; and the state of difference remains exterior to the thing. The second case, on the contrary, defines a differential Idea in the Deleuzean sense: the different colors are no longer objects under a concept, but constitute an order of mixture in coexistence and succession within the Idea; the relation between the Idea and a given color is not one of subsumption, but one of actualization and differenciation; and the state of difference between the concept and the object is internalized in the Idea itself, so that the concept itself has become the object. White light is still a universal, but it is a concrete universal, and not a genus or generality. The Idea of color is thus like white light, which “perplexes” within itself the genetic elements and relations of all the colors, but which is actualized in the diverse colors and their respective spaces. (Like the word “problem,” Deleuze uses the word “perplexion” to signify, not a coefficient of doubt, hesitation, or astonishment, but the multiple and virtual state of Ideas. Indeed, Deleuze adopts a number of neoplatonic notions to indicate the structure of Ideas, all of which are derived from the root word ‘pli’ [fold]: perplication, complication, implication, explication, and replication.) Similarly, the Idea of sound could be conceived of as a white noise, just as there is also a white society or a white language, which contains in its virtuality all the phonemes and relations destined to be actualized in the diverse languages and in the remarkable parts of a same language."



"A Thousand Plateaus maintains the tripartite ontological scheme of all of Deleuze's work, but, as the title indicates, with geological terms of reference. Deleuze and Guattari call the virtual “the Earth,” the intensive is called “consistency,” and the actual is called “the system of the strata.” As the latter term indicates, one of the foci of their investigations is the tendency of some systems to head toward congealment or stratification. More precisely put, any concrete system is composed of intensive processes tending toward the (virtual) plane of consistency and/or toward (actual) stratification. We can say that all that exists is the intensive, tending towards the limits of virtuality and actuality; these last two ontological registers do not “exist,” but they do “insist,” to use one of Deleuze's terms. Nothing ever instantiates the sheer frozen stasis of the actual nor the sheer differential dispersion of the virtual; rather, natural or worldly processes are always and only actualizations, that is, they are processes of actualization structured by virtual multiplicities and heading toward an actual state they never quite attain. More precisely, systems also contain tendencies moving in the other direction, toward virtuality; systems are more or less stable sets of processes moving in different directions, toward actuality and toward virtuality. In still other words, Deleuze and Guattari are process philosophers; neither the structures of such processes nor their completed products merit the same ontological status as processes themselves. With this perspective, Deleuze and Guattari offer a detailed and complex “open system” which is extraordinarily rich and complex. A useful way into it is to follow the concepts of coding, stratification and territorialization. They are related in the following manner. Coding is the process of ordering matter as it is drawn into a body; by contrast, stratification is the process of creating hierarchal bodies, while territorialization is the ordering of those bodies in “assemblages,” that is to say, an emergent unity joining together heterogeneous bodies in a “consistency.”"



"We will deal with Deleuze and the arts in some detail below. In discussing What is Philosophy?, let us concentrate on the treatment of the relation of philosophy and science. We should remember at the outset that the nomad or minor science evoked in A Thousand Plateaus is not the Royal or major science that makes up the entirety of what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘science’ in What is Philosophy?. The motives for this conflation are unclear; in the eyes of some, this change considerably weakens the value of the latter work. Be that as it may, in What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari vigorously deny that philosophy is needed to help science think about its own presuppositions (“no one needs philosophy to reflect on anything” [WP 6]). Instead, they emphasize the complementary nature of the two. First, they point out a number of similarities between philosophy and science: both are approaches to “chaos” that attempt to bring order to it, both are creative modes of thought, and both are complementary to each other, as well as to a third mode of creative thought, art. Beyond these similarities, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between philosophy as the creation of concepts on a plane of immanence and science as the creation of functions on a plane of reference. Both relate to the virtual, the differential field of potential transformations of material systems, but in different ways. Philosophy gives consistency to the virtual, mapping the forces composing a system as pure potentials, what the system is capable of. Meanwhile, science gives it reference, determining the conditions by which systems behave the way they actually do. Philosophy is the “counter-effectuation of the event,” abstracting an event or change of pattern from bodies and states of affairs and thereby laying out the transformative potentials inherent in things, the roads not taken that coexist as compossibles or as inclusive disjunctions (differentiation, in the terms of Difference and Repetition), while science tracks the actualization of the virtual, explaining why this one road was chosen in a divergent series or exclusive disjunction (differenciation, according to Difference and Repetition). Functions predict the behavior of constituted systems, laying out their patterns and predicting change based on causal chains, while concepts “speak the event” (WP 21), mapping out the multiplicity structuring the possible patterns of behavior of a system—and the points at which the system can change its habits and develop new ones. For Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy?, then, science deals with properties of constituted things, while philosophy deals with the constitution of events. Roughly speaking, philosophy explores the plane of immanence composed of constellations of constitutive forces that can be abstracted from bodies and states of affairs. It thus maps the range of connections a thing is capable of, its “becomings” or “affects.” Science, on the other hand, explores the concretization of these forces into bodies and states of affairs, tracking the behavior of things in relation to already constituted things in a certain delimited region of space and time (the “plane of reference”). How do concepts relate to functions? Just as there is a “concept of concept” there are also “concepts of functions,” but these are purely philosophical creations “without the least scientific value” (WP 117). Thus concrete concepts like that of “deterritorialization” are philosophical concepts, not scientific functions, even though they might resonate with, or echo, scientific functions. Nor are they metaphors, as Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly insist:

"Of course, we realize the dangers of citing scientific propositions outside their own sphere. It is the danger of arbitrary metaphor or of forced application. But perhaps these dangers are averted if we restrict ourselves to taking from scientific operators a particular conceptualizable character which itself refers to non?scientific areas, and converges with science without applying it or making it a metaphor (Deleuze 1989: 129).

Deleuze and Guattari's refusal to recognize that their work contains metaphors is due to their struggle against the “imperialism” of the signifying regime, a major theme in both Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus: not every relation between different intellectual fields can be grasped by the most common notions of “metaphor,” reliant as they are on the notion of a transfer of sense from primary to secondary signification.""



"5. Deleuze and the Arts

Kant had dissociated aesthetics into two halves: the theory of sensibility as the form of possible experience (the “Transcendental Aesthetic” of the Critique of Pure Reason), and the theory of art as a reflection on real experience (the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” in the Critique of Judgment). In Deleuze's work, these two halves of aesthetics are reunited: if the most general aim of art is to “produce a sensation,” then the genetic principles of sensation are at the same time the principles of composition for works of art; conversely, it is works of art that are best capable of revealing these conditions of sensibility. Deleuze therefore writes on the arts not as a critic but as a philosopher, and his books and essays on the various arts—including the cinema (Cinema I and II), literature (Essays Critical and Clinical), and painting (Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation)—must be read as philosophical explorations of this transcendental domain of sensibility. The cinema, for instance, produces images that move, and that move in time, and it is these two aspects of film that Deleuze set out to analyze in The Movement-Image and The Time-Image: “What exactly does the cinema show us about space and time that the other arts don't show?” Deleuze thus describes his two-volume Cinema as “a book of logic, a logic of the cinema” that sets out “to isolate certain cinematographic concepts,” concepts which are specific to the cinema, but which can only be formed philosophically. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation likewise creates a series of philosophical concepts, each of which relates to a particular aspect of Bacon's paintings, but which also find a place in “a general logic of sensation.” In general, Deleuze will locate the conditions of sensibility in an intensive conception of space and a virtual conception of time, which are necessarily actualized in a plurality of spaces and a complex rhythm of times (for instance, in the non-extended spaces and non-linear times of modern mathematics and physics)."


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/

*

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioluminescence

...

Web: Avatar Agency, A Talking Richard Rorty Bot?

Z & Scott's facebook conversation yesterday - conceiving how independent avatars might conversationally emerge, using Richard Rorty as an example, and vis-a-vis poker bots, Chomsky bot and the Turing test


3:31pmScott
Hey, Z, briefly

How's it going?

3:31pmZ
hey scott

i'm doing well, how are you

3:31pmScott
Well, thanks, too.

3:31pmZ
what are you up to these days

3:32pmScott
Any further thoughts about avatar agency?

3:35pmScott
Lost you

3:35pmZ
whoops

you there?

3:35pmScott
What are you working on?

3:35pmZ
i'm in consulting

telecom media tech

3:37pmScott
Have you finished your BA?

3:37pmZ
yeah i just graduated

probably going to law school next year

3:37pmScott
interesting projects, compared with what you might find optimal?

Congratulations

makes sense

what might you find optimal?

3:38pmZ
hmm tough to say

i dunno, i wanted to try the business thing

and making a bit of money is nice, i guess

and its certainly in an area that i'm interested in

3:39pmScott
there are creative opportunities there, too, especially with IT still

I can imagine

3:39pmZ
yeah... i think i'll probably end up going to law school, do ip law or something

its a good merger of my interests and my skills. i'll probably do dc or local politics for a while too.

3:40pmScott
Z is no longer online. The following was not sent:

I'm exploring creating a World University - MIT OCW and Wikipedia

3:41pmZ
what are you up to these days, scott?

3:43pmScott
you may have two emails in facebook about what I'm up to - teaching "Society and Information Technology in SL, ethnography and world university

1
Teaching "Society and Information Technology" in SL, and working on an ethnography about Harbin Hot Springs, with a 3-D modeling aspect - harbin.org
And you?

2
I'm exploring creating a World University - MIT OCW and Wikipedia - where anyone might post a course or request a course, - and probably with a foundation, as well as opportunities to teach.
http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/World_University


World University is a very open ended project, and potentially will continue that way

3:45pmZ
gotcha

that's cool stuff

so you must still be very involved with berkman

3:45pmScott
I'd like to start a foundation for World Univ

What's optimal is an interesting question in terms of learning and Universities. What would be most fun ways or subjects to learn for you at the Univ level?

3:47pmZ
hmm

3:47pmScott
I'm in touch with a number of faculty at Berkman - just heard Palfrey talk about "Born Digital" in SF

3:47pmZ
yeah, he's a rockstar.

3:47pmScott
really - optimality that soars, thinking broadly

:):)

3:48pmZ
gosh, i don't know--i feel like i'm pretty biased from my college experience

there were courses that i thought i'd like that i was bored sick of

and courses i thought would be boring that were incredible

intro computer science, for instance

3:48pmScott
and the incredible ones were? And why?

3:49pmZ
i enjoyed cs, intro psych

3:49pmScott
structured flow experiences that led to constructing something?

3:49pmZ
kantian ethics

all sorts of weird stuff

yeah that helped

but ultimately just stuff i was interested in.

3:49pmScott
why kantian ethics?

I can see why the 1st two might be interested in terms of 'flow'

3:50pmZ
it's just fascinating. kant's ethics is sublime--the epitome of pure reason.

3:50pmScott
probably similarly with kantian ethics?

3:50pmZ
kant's ethics is very... analytic

very logically driven

3:50pmScott
is it well structured? or one aspect?

3:51pmZ
well a great professor

well structured by any standard, i'm sure

but its hard to compare across fields like that

3:51pmScott
Yea - Was psych logical, as well? or insightful, or both?

3:51pmZ
more the latter.

3:52pmScott
they are such distinct fields

3:51pmZ
just really fascinating stuff -- this is how we think.

sorry i can't be more helpful. i'll think about it, though.

3:52pmScott
i'm curious, - about psych vis-a-vis avatar agency, too

3:52pmZ
definitely.

3:52pmScott
Rorty recorded into a database and then delivered semantically and interactively through an avatar?

3:54pmScott
if you come across any parts of that scenario - programs, etc. - please let me know - do you know of any?

3:54pmZ
yeah

3:54pmScott
stating with poker bots that might be coded to deliver sentences rather than poker hands

for example

3:55pmZ
that sounds sweet

3:55pmScott
and realizable, - but how?

3:58pmZ
hmm

i imagine that would be the easy part

making the delivery meaningful, harder

4:00pmScott
so the 'semantic' program might get as close as the chomsky bot, for example, but not closer?

4:00pmZ
yeah

at least you'd have to do some convincing

4:01pmScott
more bandwidth? :):)

4:01pmZ
always a start.

4:01pmScott
run chomsky bot faster, and get to more reaslitic meaning more quickly?

believable, that is - closer to Turing's ideal (that's what it is, isn't it?)

4:03pmZ
yeah

will it be enough? i guess we'll see.

4:04pmScott
why not start afresh with a sophisticated poker bot, or does that basic software 'underlie' the chomsky bot?

4:06pmScott
...where the playing of hands was accelerated with bandwidth, such that semantic delivery developed in 3-4 directions, and thus conversationally, and thus depart from the premises of Chomsky bot software?

4:08pmZ
developing the semantic delivery doesn't solve the root problem though

4:08pmScott
a kind of theater-game, word game, dialogue generativity software approach

4:08pmZ
it's still an algorithim

4:08pmScott
for flexible understanding

4:09pmZ
understanding is a malleable term

4:09pmScott
and novel conjunctions of ideas?

4:09pmZ
by understanding, you mean it's a mutating algorithim, or some such thing

the argument isn't that such an algorithim couldn't solve the problem. it's just that its highly unlikely given we don't understand what the problem is.

4:10pmScott
mutating or conversational

4:10pmZ
we don't know enough about our own language, our own brains, to create a machine capable of emulating it

4:10pmScott
defining understanding in computational terms? or defining conversation similarly? or, in terms of Rorty, defining philosophy?

so, semantics, superficially, is what you mean

4:11pmZ
more or less

i'm just a skeptic of reverse engineering.

4:11pmScott
which, I wonder?

4:12pmZ
superficially is too perjorative

4:13pmScott
I have to go soon, but Terrence Deacon at Berkeley who wrote "The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of the Brain and Language" (his Harvard Ph.D.) takes a reverse engineering approach, - there are lots of sophisticated communicative species as a start

4:13pmZ
i'll keep an eye out for it

thanks for the heads up

and for the conversation.

4:13pmScott
I have to do something now, but let's talk soon - likewise

ciao

4:13pmZ
cheers scott

















(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2008/09/web-avatar-agency-talking-richard-rorty.html - September 23, 2008)

Flowers: Optimalness for People When There's No Warm Water

Great ideas in clothing-optional warm pools

or

delightful flow experiences in an anthropology, philosophy or idea-oriented class?

Positive intimacy?

Music?

Neurophysiological loving bliss?


How to synthesize and orchestrate these over decades?



Relaxation Response {Meditation?}